cover image Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky

Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky

Gabriella Safran, Harvard/Belknap, $29.95 (410p) ISBN 978-0-674-05570-4

Author of the most famous Yiddish play, The Dybbuk, the radical activist Semyon Akimovich An-sky (1863–1920) was born Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport into a poor Yiddish-speaking family in a Russian shtetl. But he mastered Russian as an adolescent and journeyed through Eastern and Western Europe during his successful, multifaceted career as a journalist, playwright, poet, fiction writer, ethnographer, and public speaker. Fluid in his identities and loyalties, An-sky never fit neatly into his society's categories, constantly reinventing himself as he shifted between his Russian and Jewish, traditional and radical, selves. His lifelong dedication to the Russian peasants often blinded him to their anti-Semitism, and his WWI diary reveals his sympathy for both the Russian soldiers he met as an aid worker and the Galician Jews they brutalized. His marriage to a much younger woman collapsed after she (fed up with a husband "who had more time for his cultural mission than for his wife") became pregnant by a lover. Although scholarly, this biography by Safran, a Stanford associate professor of Slavic literature, is lucid, accessible, authoritative, and nuanced and does justice to the restless, passionate artist and revolutionary. 26 photos; 1 map. (Nov.)